The Wakeful Trump of Doom Must Thunder Through the Deep

(‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity Compos’d 1629’ – Milton)

The Fool – Sean Spicer

The face you are looking at no longer exists.
On message
then on cue,
fanning the rage script.
First deny, then deny.
Braced like a quarterback.
Apostle in warpaint.

The High Priestess – Kellyanne Conway

Pollster at the goalposts, pulling
For the slow-witted striker plagued
By bone-spurs. A mastermind
Of massacre, queen of borrowed light
In her crown of horns. Gnostic
Interviewee, confounding facts
With their alternatives.

The Magician – Reince Priebus

High-wire adjudicator
Of ‘American values’ vs. Growth
and Opportunity Projects.
Nicknamed ‘rancid’, but
Dick to his friends—
The tea-parties of Wisconsin.
‘I was once a man’, he declares
pulling something familiar
from under his cloak
and snapping its neck.

The Empress – Melania Trump

I am gold—see my son, he is also gold.
It is his mother tongue.
1600 Pennsylvania Ave is just an address.
A dress is just a way into a woman.
A woman is just a means to an end.
An end is a wife who never says never.

The Emperor – Donald Trump

Nuclear comma splice—in the year
Of the fire rooster. Caligula at the chapel
Of himself, neurosyphilitic, sexual sadist,
Horse as counsellor, sisters in his bed.
Terrible omen, a reign of four years.
This card rises to the top like heat,
Like the blast from a furnace.

The Hierophant – Paul Ryan

Orderly for anything but the coldness of failure.
This card, placed upside down, means the victory
of restriction. Belief in a God occulted by man.
He is a metalogical jostler, in the traditional sense.
Positioning sticky, he applies himself
to hero sacrifice and other peculiar seekings.

The Devil – Steve Bannon

The harbourmaster’s sudden oar.
The overstir of an invisible hand.
Evil or injur’d merit, serpent or martyr.
This card is impervious as any recruiter
of terror. Hear war whistle from the sea.

Temperance – Nigel Farage

Whatever needs feeding is feeding on you.
Upright uprightness.
Downright excess.
A regular mucky Bombardier
in a four million semi.
Temperance to Emperor signifies
blind domination,
a vomitus grimace in the gold lift.

The Tower – Theresa May

Beware a woman bearing Royal Invitations.
Beware sharing a bed with Empire
or other genocidal dictators.
Beware the special relationship colour
CODE RED. Beware she who offers her hand
To the tyrant stumbling with vertigo,
her house crown-roofed,
her tower contorting with fire.

Sandeep Parmar is a poet, critic and Senior Lecturer in English and Co-Director of the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool. Her books include Eidolon (Shearsman, 2015), The Marble Orchard (Shearsman, 2012) and scholarly editions of Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011) and Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard (Carcanet, 2016).

James Byrne is a poet, editor and translator and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. His poetry collections include Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo Press, 2015), White Coins (Arc Publications, 2015), and Blood/Sugar (Arc Publications, 2009). His translations of Burmese poets, Bones Will Crow, was published in 2012 by Arc. He is Editor of The Wolf.

New Boots – the Anthology!

A selection of 100 poems from the project is now available in book form from Smokestack (price £8.99) - go here to order.

"Why the devil I throw my money away for that which the blockheads wish?" (G.F. Handel)

Welcome poets, polemicists and the disbelieving masses

The 2015 General Election made manifest the great sea-change that had been occurring in UK politics over the last fifteen to twenty years. Previous certainties, like Labour’s Scottish hegemony, are no more. Older patterns, like Conservative dominance of England, reasserted themselves.

The idea of the UK as a single country has been replaced by a plurality of identities, some long known to the other countries and regions, others formulating themselves as time passes. For that reason, we thought it might be an interesting experiment to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators, the poets, over the first 100 days of the new dispensation.

We ended up publishing a poem a day for 138 days, each one responding to some aspect of the new unrealpolitik. We then set to editing a book of 100 poems in order to, as we thought then, conclude the project.

However, the results of the EU Referendum showed that the slow slew in British political identity toward disillusionment and division had reached a breaking point that made even more evident the contrasts already indicated by the Scottish referendum and the General Election. We felt we had to begin again...

Stay with us, and see what the hell happens next. Oh fuck, it's Trump.

Commissioning and Contributions

This site is maintained by self-appointed voluntary arts drones working on zero hours non-contracts. Therefore we simply can't process unsolicited work, and will have to proceed initially at least by invitations. We hope we've got enough sense to ask *you* for a contribution, but please don't be offended if we're so stupid, tired or disempowered that we haven't approached you yet.